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Medieval sexuality and the Catholic Church

What’s known about sexuality in medieval England is limited enough that I’m not going to mess with the rest of Britain. The picture’s already murky without asking extra figures to wander through the fog. And to complicate the picture, a few bits of information that I found seem to apply generally to Europe, although presumably also to England.

I’ll focus on Christian England, since religion is central to the discussion, but not everyone in medieval England was Christian. In 1290, when the Jews were banished from England, 16,000 left (they were counted out automatically as they went through the turnstile), so let’s use 16,000 as a rough estimate of the size of the medieval Jewish community. They lived by their own rules, not the Catholic Church’s.

Muslims can first be spotted in England in the sixteenth century, so in the era we’re talking about they were sitting in the sun somewhere and not part of the picture we’re trying to make out in the fog.

Most of what’s known about medieval attitudes toward sex comes from–where else?–written sources: church writers, court records, and literature, all of which had their biases.

Irrelevant photo: apple blossoms.

Source One, the Catholic Church, had bet its chips against sex. Or not quite against sex, since in its core document god tells his creations to go forth and multiply, and (spoiler alert) that involves sex. But they had bet, at least, against anyone having fun while doing what they’d been told to do.

Either all or many of the monks and priests who wrote about sex had taken vows of chastity, so at least in theory they had either no first-hand knowledge or only a distant memory to draw on. We can’t know how much their attitudes coincided with what people outside the church thought–or more to the point, did. We can know that they weren’t your average medieval person.

Did you notice how weaselly I was about monks and priests having taken vows of chastity? That’s because it’s hard to date set a date to when that was became an issue. You can find discussions of it in the eleventh century and also the fifth. And the ninth. And if I looked further, I’m sure I could find a few more centuries. Let’s just say that it took hold gradually and didn’t win without a fight.

Source Two, the courts–and there were both church and secular courts–only dealt with people who’d broken a restriction or had been accused of it, so there’s a bias built into the sample. But they leave a good record of–well, not necessarily of what people did, but at least of what someone thought they did. And what the authorities thought they shouldn’t be doing.

Source Three, literature, hadn’t caught the idea that it should reflect real life. A lot of it still hasn’t. I wouldn’t want to base a study of modern sexual practices on a quick troll through a bookstore and far less on a survey of movies.

But there’s a fourth source, medical books, and some were concerned only with the practicalities of medicine, not with the shoulds and shouldn’ts of people’s behavior, although others did a good bit of finger wagging and not all medical writers were good observers of the real world.

A major problem with all these sources is that peasants were illiterate. They not only didn’t read, they didn’t write, so they didn’t leave a record. Their lives went largely undocumented and what documentation we do have came from other people–literate people from the upper classes.

A fifth source is illustrations–tapestries and book illustrations–but they’re hard to interpret. The Bayeux tapestry shows a man with an erection running toward a woman. Is he threatening some random stranger? Is she glad to see him home? We don’t know how to interpret the image and we don’t know how someone of the time would have interpreted it.

We’ll work with what we’ve got. Don’t mistake any of it for the definitive truth.

The going assumption was that women were either either chaste or sexually ravenous–the old virgin / whore thing, but more so. Women were thought of as sexually disruptive. I’ve seen the word predatory used, and men’s fear of women’s sexuality fueled their fear of witchcraft. Hell, a woman could turn a man on by looking at him, because the eye didn’t just take in, it sent out seeing-rays that affected what they saw.

That last link is the only source I could find for that, but I think it’s legit.

So sex was a danger and the church dealt with it by restricting it–less so at the beginning of the medieval period and more so by the end. Keep that in mind, because I haven’t been able to date any of this.

According to church rules, you weren’t supposed to have sex either before you were married or outside of marriage, but even inside of marriage, you had to be careful. The only approved way to have sex was in the missionary position. Anything else might lead to a deformed child and was a sin anyway. (These restrictions also come from the link above and I haven’t been able to back them up with a second source.)

You also couldn’t have sex on a Sunday. Or a Thursday or Friday. Or during Lent. Or before Christmas. (So what do you want for Christmas, dear?) Or on assorted saints’ days and feast days.

Or during your lifetime or anyone else’s.

Having sex when a woman had her period would produce a child with epilepsy or (or possibly and) leprosy, according to one medical treatise.

How would anyone know what they did in the privacy of their bedroom? Two ways.

Way one, confession was part of the culture. People told their sins to a priest–either all of them or enough to keep up appearances. So everyone had an informer built into their lives.

Did I say their lives? Into their very selves.

Way two, people didn’t have bedrooms. If they had any privacy at all, they didn’t have much. Entire families slept in one room, making sex something people were necessarily open about.

Partway through the medieval period, the rich began building solars–separate rooms where they slept and could withdraw from the public mayhem of the hall. But even in the houses of the rich, everyone else slept in public spaces. (If you google solars, make sure you ask about the medieval kind, otherwise you’ll be sent weeks’ worth of ads for solar panels.)

One source I found speculates that empty churches might have functioned as the medieval equivalent of the back seat of a car. Two people who weren’t married would want a bit of privacy, not because sex was private but because sin was. Breaking the rules was. A person wanting to masturbate might also want a bit of privacy. And I’m willing to bet that anyone seen to be enjoying a bit of privacy for anything other than prayer and penitence was suspect.

In all of this, keep in mind that marriage among the upper classes wasn’t about love or attraction, it was about land and money and power. If married people were tempted to look outside their marriages for a bit of joy, it was hardly surprising.

Masturbation was a sin, but no more so than a thousand other things. It was also a sin for a man to have sex with an effeminate man or with another man. (In the source where I found this, these seem to be separate categories, although I’m not sure how much weight to give that.) But homosexuality as we think of it not only wasn’t a sin, it wasn’t a concept. Their categories were different than ours, and their thought patterns were different than ours. The best I can do by way of explaining it to myself is to say that it wasn’t about who you were but what you did.

Rape wasn’t much of a concern for the courts or the church. The assumption was that men took what they wanted. But it would’ve been a concern to the person who was raped and, if it was a woman, to her family, since a family’s honor depended on its women’s sexual–ahem–purity. And among the upper classes, a girl or young woman’s virginity was worth money: finding her a good marriage depended on it, and marriage, I repeat, was a financial arrangement, not just for her but for her family. So her virginity was her family’s concern at least as much as it was hers. That meant the sexual standards for women were stricter than for men. A man’s misbehavior dishonored only himself, and I’d at least consider the possibility that some misbehaviors didn’t dishonor him for long.

Prostitution was a sin but at the same time it was tolerated, and even considered necessary–so much so that brothels were often publicly owned. Yes indeedy, kids, it takes some work to bend our modern minds into the medieval mindset. In court cases where a man was claimed to be impotent–impotence being one of the few reasons a marriage could be dissolved–a prostitute might be brought in to a test the claim. If he wasn’t interested, it would’ve been hard for him to claim he was.

Presumably, if he wasn’t interested in one woman, he was assumed not to be interested in any.

Although the clothes prostitutes wore marked them as prostitutes, they weren’t necessarily shunned by lower-class communities. Some women worked as part-time prostitutes, adding their earnings to whatever other income they had. The ways a single woman–whether she was unmarried, widowed, or abandoned–could make a living were limited and people did what they had to.

So on the one hand sex was highly restricted and on the other hand people were very open about it. Metal badges–the kind pilgrims brought back from holy sites–have been found with images of flying penises on them. What did they mean? It’s hard to know. Maybe people liked flying penises. Maybe the badges were supposed to restore a man’s ability to make his own penis feel like it was flying. It’s all guesswork after this many years. It seems like a safe bet, though, that a flying penis wasn’t considered offensive.

Early in the middle ages, couples didn’t have to be married by a priest and marriages didn’t have to be recorded. In villages, I I doubt there’d have been much question about who was married to who–everyone knew everyone else’s story for generations back–but in less cohesive communities that could get messy and courts occasionally saw couples, or non-couples, or semi-couples, where A claimed to be married to B but B claimed not to be married to A.

Medicine, in the absence of anything approaching science, ranged from imaginative to hallucinatory. One writer claimed that if a woman ate sage that a cat had ejaculated on, she’d have kittens.

Don’t try this at home, kids. It might work and you’ll have a hell of a time explaining it to your family and friends and neighbors.

Some medical writers considered sex necessary to balance the humors, and everyone agreed that good health depended on balanced humors. They considered masturbation–or at least wet dreams–inevitable. Some even recommended it to celibate people. Galen (pre-medieval, but much admired in the period) suggested that physicians or midwives could “’place hot poultices on the . . . genitals’ of a celibate woman and ‘cause [her] to experience orgasm, which would release the retained seed.’“

What was in the poultices? Fairy dust, and if I can get a supply, I’m going into business.

So orgasm was okay but it was for medicinal purposes only. If you enjoyed it too much, that would be voluptuousness, and the church said voluptuousness was bad.

Since female virginity mattered so much, some medical writings listed ways to figure out if a woman was a virgin, including “observing a woman’s behavior, urine inspection, and sometimes actual intercourse. Other texts offer not only the tests, but also ways to restore a woman’s virginity.”

And if that sounds bizarre–and it does–all you have to do is google secondary virginity to find that the idea of restoring virginity is still with us. Some fundamentalist Christians call it born-again virginity or second-generation virginity. You can even get re-hymenized.

95 thoughts on “Medieval sexuality and the Catholic Church”

I just got back from googling him and I’m now well-informed on the eleventh commandment, which involves the approved uses of social media. He’s welcome to join the conversation if he can get past the swearing.

Even though I took a college course in medieval history and another in medieval literature, most of what you wrote here I’ve not heard before. But it shows the double standard has lived a very long time.

Indeed it has. And I think the idea of writing serious history about sexuality is fairly recent. I was looking at a book on the social history of medieval England for anything useful it might have to say. It said nothing. Zilch. The closest it came was to talk about marriage, which I’ll admit does overlap with the topic but is far from identical with it.

It’s like being in a sweet shop. I could almost write a comment as long as your post, so I’ll limit myself.

Medievalist.net is a good source. They also have a podcast and a recent episode was about sexuality in the Middle Ages.

As far as I can tell, monks were always celibate, but priests weren’t necessarily. I think it was in the thirteenth century that the tide finally began to turn firmly towards celibacy, although many priests still kept concubines.

We generalise a lot about the Middle Ages, but it was a long period of time and the same things didn’t apply at all times and in all places. There were times and places where rape wasn’t necessarily considered a crime and other times and places where it was punishable by death. There were times and places where it was believed that a woman had to enjoy sex in order to conceive and times when it wasn’t.

Given that so little is known about sexuality in the Middle Ages, a disproportionate number of books have been written on the subject. I think I’ve got four of them.

I’m relieved to hear you say that they’re a reliable source. There stuff sounds and looks reputable but–well, that’s the internet for you. Anybody can publish anything. Including me.

Thanks for the additional information. I’d read about the beleif that women had to enjoy sex to conceive but didn’t know it was a less that universal belief of the period. You’re right–it was a long stretch of time, and from this distance it’s easy to underestimate the differences.

Communal sleeping is the norm here still…Not in my house, I will add but certainly, in the villages and well of course prostitution does not exist here..ahem…Not much changes here and I am sure other Asian cultures are the same…

And, although in a different way, among the ruling classes if some of the brothels were municipally owned. It’s funny how easy it is to assume that people everywhere think and have always thought as we do.

I was born in the 50’s, went to high school in the 60’s and college in the early 70’s. If you were raised Catholic which I was, attended Catholic school which I did and tried to pay attention to church teaching you were pretty much guaranteed to have warped views about sex. In college I was convinced I had a venereal disease. Even though I was a smart guy and had been taught sex was generally required for social diseases so I should have had no reason to think my problem was sexually transmitted, I did. Awash with shame, I went to the school’s VD clinic. My first shock was that the doctor was a woman. I had heard they existed but had never seen one and this lady was telling me to show her my penis, I was mortified. The grabbed that puppy and rubbed the end of it on a glass slide and told me to check back a couple days later. Shame in still in tact, I followed up two days later. The doctor went over the results with me and told me I had prostatitis. The resolution? She told me I wasn’t masturbating enough. That ran counter to years of Catholic education. However, I was young male with hormones so it sounded good to me. That was my first step toward a healthy attitude about sex. It only took another 20 or 30 years to get there. I have never experienced prostatitis again.

My whole current belief system is based on the fact that religions and the rules their leaders make are usually at odds with the basic tenets of their faith (regardless of religion). As a result, unless they return to their root, they don’t have the moral authority to guide me on my faith. Watch what they do.

My sense is that, no matter what the founding beliefs are, as soon as a religion becomes integrated into the social and economic structures of a society, it shifts to prop them up. Which is another way of saying it becomes corrupt. I’d be happy to hear of a counter example but I can’t think of one.

Well, it was a very male religion that told the tale about Eve. (It is, when you think about it, a very strange tale.) But you’re right: Given the guilt spattered in all directions, the human race’s continuation is a monument to the power of the sexual drive.

I have read and heard all kinds of interpretations of the tale. Strange story is right. I supppse the people who made it up had a point they were trying to make, but it has been lost over time.
Middle Ages was a strange time. With limited scientific knowledge they made things up as they went. Most of it just sounds odd to us. I wonder what we think that is going to sound odd to people in the future, if we have a future.

If we have a future indeed. But yes, we’re going to look very strange.

One of the pre-scientific beliefs that–I’m not sure why–I find fascinating was the belief that if a plant looked like some human organ, it was good for that organ. Some of the plants they used have been shown to work–hedge woundwort has some antiseptic properties and scurvygrass has enough vitamin C to help with scurvy (it also tastes foul). But beyond that, it was the wild west in the wildflower garden and the hedgerow.

I haven’t heard that there is one, but then I’m probably not traveling in the right circles. With that said, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be. You’d be as convincing as anyone else trying to play on that toddler ride.

Only the opinion by another older guy, but being virginal implies lack of knowledge and experience. I would think those two characteristics would be a plus for the older man. What woman would want to have take time for basic classroom training for the older man. However, there’s always someone for everyone.

Euphemizing celibacy into “secondary virginity” grates on my ears, but yes, some older women like older men who’ve developed self-control. Especially in the presence of evidence that it’s a choice…I suspect a lot of medieval monks and nuns claimed they’d developed the virtue of chastity when they’d actually gone postsexual due to aging and malnutrition.

Well, I can’t rule that out. It’s not easy to apply a text that’s thousands of years old to the modern world. The US constitution, which is a hell of a lot more recent, presents some of the same challenges.

Southwark….on the south side of the Thames,….was outside the jurisdiction of the City of London. Instead it came under the jurisdiction of the Bishopric of Winchester who had bought what was known as the liberty of the land from its original owner. As lord of the manor, the Bishop could – and did – licence brothels, the inmates of which were known as the Bishop of Winchester’s geese.

Oh, ouch, junior high school. That any of us survive it at all is an argument in favor of miracles–and I say that as someone who doesn’t believe in miracles. It’s the only argument for them that I can think of.

It’s a good thing your parents hadn’t heard that line about the church being the era-appropriate equivalent of the back seat of a car. But times had changed by then, what with the car (not to mention other forms of privacy) having been invented and all. Jokes aside, though, that’s a touchingly awkward tale.

Interesting points, both of them. The snake had legs? I never knew that. I tried to read the bible once, when I was in my teens, and thought, right, book, start at the beginning and go until you reach the end. The begats ended the effort, and whatever (if anything) comes before them I don’t remember. The point being that I come by my ignorance honestly. At which point I guess I should say that I’ve never seen the Bayeux Tapestry live and in the flesh, but I can easily believe that it has a where’s-Waldo quality. And I seem to remember reading, in passing, that what we have isn’t the whole of it–parts have disappeared over the centuries.

Genesis 3 : 14-15…God is reading the riot act to the snake, then goes on to read the riot act to Eve, also, cursing her with labor – as in childbirth. (I had to look it up, but I knew it couldn’t be very far into the story.)
The begats are indeed wearying. And of course, Jesus is descended from King David through his father Joseph (“he was of the house and lineage of David…”) who, um, wasn’t actually Jesus’s real father.

Hm. Very good, informative post.
I was just wondering if the man running around with the erection in The Bayeux Tapestry bore any resemblance to a certain US president that runs around with an erection evidently most of the time – chasing women thither and yon?

Than Clinton? Kennedy? “Tiny hands” is supposed to imply one of those teeny-weeny ones women have to hunt down. Other living and recently dead Presidents are rumored to behave well around women, though I’ve seen delirious, probably wishful rants about Obama preferring men.

I would imagine the written books of the time reflected sexual life among the well-to-do segment of society, the intelligentsia, much as it does today (not many Hallmark movies about middle- or lower-class people).

Never understood how the Shakers expected to last more than a couple generations.

I’m sure you’re right about the first point. The Shakers, though, first by attracting converts, but also by adoption: They took in and raised many orphans, and are said to have raised them with love. Although the sect still faded. https://adoption.com/wiki/Shakers_and_Adoption

That makes sense. It’s just that I’m–well, not taking this seriously has been liberating. I do take the research seriouslsy, and I do my best to be accurate, but a throwaway attitude is new to me and thinking of it as assigned reading is, um. I’m not sure what it is. Flattering, yes, immensely, but it throws me.

I was listening to a radio talk show a couple of days ago and the host was discussing the relatively new concept of homosexuality. It just wasn’t something that people worried about in the 1800’s. How’d we go backwards?

A good question to which I don’t have the definitive answer. In part, I think it’s because it was invisible to most people. That didn’t necessarily make it easier to be what we’d now define as gay–it didn’t make space in the world for a person to live with same-sex attractions, although it did mean they weren’t the focus of suspicion or hatred.

That was an absolutely fascinating read! Last year I read a book about the day to day lives of people during the Medieval era. Also, I have recently stumbled upon the existence of the “plague doctor”; that took me down an internet rabbit hole. I have been interested in this epoch ever since. Excellent job here.

“Life in a Medieval City” by Frances Ches and Joseph Gies (had to open my Kindle app for that info.) I thought it was great. It reads a little dry, almost text-book like, but the content was so riveting that I didn’t mind. Just to give an insight to my tastes though, I am finishing David Copperfield at the moment and it has entertained my pants off! I mean, there were sections that I could not put it down. I was shocked when I saw 1,000,000 Goodreads’ reveiws saying it was boring. I was like “HOW?!?!”

Ouch. During retreat from Paypal I’ve been trying to take the book posts to Goodreads. Some reactions there are clueless, and some seem to be about completely different books than the ones I’ve read…but…

Their obviously Indian subcontractors had obtained “security questions” from the IRS that did not belong in cyberspace. So I’ve suspended my Paypal account in order to restructure the business so that information must follow a more circuitous route.